But Rick - do you agree that 1) lipreading is very hard, tiring, and takes time away from learning class information 2) terps fail to show up, is late, or not competent is not usual and can be fixed (replacement) and 3) ASL benefits the deaf/HoH kid?
Lipreading is very hard
From Center for Hearing Loss Help:
Speachreading (lip-reading)
English is not a particularly easy language to speechread. Some languages are much easier (and some are even harder). The best estimates are that 30% to 35% of English sounds can be speechread. In order for a sound to be easily speechread, it must be formed on the lips and/or in the front of the mouth.
Unfortunately for us, we form many English sounds in the middle of our mouths. Others come from the back of our mouths and even in our throats. These latter are absolutely impossible to speechread.
As a result, a perfect speechreader only would be able to speechread about one third of what is said. They guess at the rest, taking into consideration their understanding of the spoken language, the body language of the speaker and the subject under discussion. Some people are remarkably good at guessing but no one is perfect.
Lipreading is tiring
From Center for Hearing Loss Help:
Speachreading (lip-reading)
From A downside of speechreading, and one that is not obvious, is that it is very tiring, especially with someone who is hard to speechread in the first place. Fatigue is the constant companion of most hard of hearing people whether they realise it or not. Speechreading takes enormous concentration. We have to work very hard to understand what is being said. We must follow every lip movement, every facial expression, every gesture, to try to find meaning in what you are saying. We cannot relax our eyes for even a moment and have a nice easy conversation like people with normal hearing can.
Speechreading is not merely a matter of just watching speech movements, but includes considerable mental effort in making sense from an incompletely perceived message. In fact, I’ve heard our brains have to work five times as hard to understand speech as do those of people with normal hearing. In the course of a day, our brains have done as much mental gymnastics as a person with normal hearing does in a whole week! No wonder we get tired so fast!
Lipreading takes time away from learning class information
From Center for Hearing Loss Help:
Speachreading (lip-reading)
Another downside of speechreading is that we spend so much of our time just trying to understand the words the person is saying that we can easily miss the meaning they are trying to communicate.
ASL benefits deaf/HoH kids
From Topics in Language Disorders, v18 n4 p47-60 Aug 1998:
ASL Proficiency and English Literacy within a Bilingual Deaf Education Model of Instruction
Examines the theoretical models and arguments in the debate concerning possible relationships between natural sign language proficiency and English literacy. It presents findings of a study with 155 school-aged deaf children that supported such a connection.
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From Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 2:1 1997: A Study of the Relationship Between American Sign Language and English Literacy
This article presents the findings of a study of the relationship between American Sign Language (ASL) skills and English literacy among 160 deaf children. Using a specially designed test of ASL to determine three levels of ASL ability, we found that deaf children who attained the higher two levels significantly outperformed children in the lowest ASL ability level in English literacy, regardless of age and IQ. Furthermore, although deaf children with deaf mothers outperformed deaf children of hearing mothers in both ASL and English literacy, when ASL level was held constant, there was no difference between these two groups, except in the lowest level of ASL ability. The implication of this research is straightforward and powerful: Deaf children's learning of English appears to benefit from the acquisition of even a moderate fluency in ASL.
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From J Deaf Stud Deaf Educ. 1997 Summer;2(3):150-60:
Modality of language shapes working memory: evidence from digit span and spatial span in ASL signers.
Deaf children who are native users of American Sign Language (ASL) and hearing children who are native English speakers performed three working memory tasks. Results indicate that language modality shapes the architecture of working memory. Digit span with forward and backward report, performed by each group in their native language, suggests that the language rehearsal mechanisms for spoken language and for sign language differ in their processing constraints. Unlike hearing children, deaf children who are native signers of ASL were as good at backward recall of digits as at forward recall, suggesting that serial order information for ASL is stored in a form that does not have a preferred directionality. Data from a group of deaf children who were not native signers of ASL rule out explanations in terms of a floor effect or a nonlinguistic visual strategy. Further, deaf children who were native signers outperformed hearing children on a nonlinguistic spatial memory task, suggesting that language expertise in a particular modality exerts an influence on nonlinguistic working memory within that modality. Thus, language modality has consequences for the structure of working memory, both within and outside the linguistic domain.
